


a little oh, a little bit

by JellyDishes



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Emotional constipation plus time travel equals fun, F/M, implied nsfw shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 03:10:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20351413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes
Summary: Five closes his eyes one night in Vanya's apartment, and opens them to a world that doesn't quite feel right. Everything is slightly off-kilter, and his fear only grows when he talks to Vanya.





	a little oh, a little bit

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and thoughts are absolutely welcome, though it may take me some time to respond due to my anxiety. Please be patient with me!

Five had forgotten how _ loud _ the world could be. Growing up and then growing older in the apocalypse meant that he had become accustomed to silence. Even after all the years he had spent working for the commission, he hadn't really become adjusted to the change. 

Then he had returned to the year 2019. 

His relief was overwhelmed and lost beneath the sheer amount of people he had come back to. They vastly outnumbered the commission. He had intellectually known this of course, but knowing that and hearing it were two different things. And there was no escaping it; even the relative isolation of Vanya’s apartment did not shield him from the endless drone of thousands upon thousands of people and the detritus of their lives. 

Sometimes, it was a comfort. The first night after returning to what was his past, he hadn't been able to sleep a wink. He'd simply sat on the edge of a roof and let it all wash over him in waves. No better reminder than that, that he'd arrived at the right time. 

Other times it was more of a mild, if annoyingly persistent torture. How could anyone be expected to sleep with people breathing and laughing and fighting and _ living _ without pause? It was overwhelming, it was maddening, and it often kept him awake. Such was the case tonight. He had lost track of time after a while, while also feeling every second pass excrutiatingly slowly. 

Five had never possessed any amount of patience for frustration at the best of times. Adding sleeplessness and unease to that meant that he had started to twitch, then bounce, until finally he had risen to pace. At some point he'd started to write. The hours had slipped away from him, and he was disconcerted to look up later and see full sunlight streaming through Vanya’s bedroom window. 

For a moment, he hadn't known what to think. He drew his eyebrows together in a dull sort of surprise, confused at how he hadn't thought to keep track. Time was far too precious these days to be so wasteful. He found himself drawing back slightly in his seat. 

He hadn't consciously wanted to run. It was reflexive, recoiling from unexpected discomfort, and it was annoying. Five was already scowling when the blue light of his teleportation powers had melted and run together to create the world again. He was mid-stride when the ground slid into place beneath his shoes, and kept right on walking while the world remembered that somebody was watching. It resolved itself into the rooftop of Vanya’s apartment building. Between the cluster of buildings crowded together as if for warmth, the sky was a startling shade of gold spun together with pale cream. Beautiful, the way the sunrise had stubbornly continued to be after everything else stopped rising at all. 

To be honest, it was both more and less beautiful than he remembered from growing up after the apocalypse. The smoke and ash and debris that had clung to the air had always given the sunrise a stunningly vivid range of colors that could only be achieved in such times. Now, it seemed a poor reproduction while also taking his breath away. There was no telling how many thousands of others could be looking at this same sight, including and especially Vanya. 

Mouth firming, he strode back across the roof. As he walked, he twisted his powers so that it dissolved away beneath him like mist, or a cloud of chalk dust. Between one step and the next, Vanya’s bedroom appeared around him. He turned before it had even finished solidifying around him so that he avoided hitting a bed he hadn't consciously seen yet, then again to move back to his seat. It was only as he sat with an impatient huff that he heard the blankets rustle. He glanced over in time to see Vanya’s mouth turn down. “What time is it?” She rasped. Her voice was thick with sleep, and something about hearing it made him avert his eyes. 

“Time to get out of bed. Don’t you have students to teach today?”

There was a silence filled with several other silences of varying intensity, followed by “Shit!”

“You should probably do that before the first one gets here,” he commented mildly. She responded by throwing a pillow at him, which he caught and stuck behind him without looking up at her. 

She lurched out of the bed with another string of muttered words he made a mental note to tease her about later. Just now, he was a little too preoccupied admiring her bare ass as she stumbled into the bathroom to bother. He was already looking away when she glanced back at him from the door, staring deeply at her bookcase without seeing it. His cheeks felt hot. “Why didn't you wake me up?” He heard her say plaintively. 

A smile tugged at his lips and he shrugged, although he knew she couldn’t see it. “I had more important things on my mind, Vanya.” It didn't come out sharp, but it didn't have to. He was answered with silence. 

A short time later, Vanya emerged from the bathroom in a worn sundress. Her hair and cheeks were wet, and that wild, panicky look had faded into determination. He watched as she immediately moved to start stripping the bed (as opposed to the sort of stripping he far preferred.) “I thought you were in a hurry?” The old ones didn't even look dirty to him, and he said that too, just to fill the silence. 

Vanya laughed in a way he hadn't heard since they were kids, and wrinkled her nose at him as she flapped the new, constellation patterned sheet high and let it sink down across the bed. “Just because _ you _ like stewing in your own sweat every night doesn't mean I do. I change them once a week.”

To someone who'd spent decades hovering on the knife’s edge of death in an already dead world, it seemed an almost baffling waste of resources. He chose not to say so out aloud, and instead watched Vanya… _ putter. _There was really no other word for how she smoothed out already crisp sheets and fixed her blankets and pillows just so. Half of it, he imagined was a holdover from being raised with an almost militaristic rigidity, and the other half was indescribable in a way he didn't find he minded. It felt almost domestic, which in and of itself was a new notion. 

That strange sense of uncertainty tinged with something soft twisted his belly again, and he looked away. “I have work to do,” he told her stiffly. He didn't wait for an answer he wasn't ready to hear anyway, and vanished before she could turn around. 

* * *

  
He threw himself into investigating Harold Jenkins until long after the sun had gone down. Until his muscles burned and his eyelid twitched. Only then did he finally turn himself back towards Vanya’s apartment, and staggered into bed with barely more than a word in Vanya’s direction.

When he next opened his eyes, he immediately knew something was wrong. Off. He couldn't place it, however, and he frowned as he slowly pushed himself upright in bed. Vanya’s bed, in Vanya’s bedroom. It was quiet and still. Through the open door, he heard water and clanking dishes from the direction of the kitchen. And, just beneath that on the edge of hearing, he heard Vanya’s voice. She was singing. He didn't recognize the song, but it didn't really matter, because she wouldn't have been singing if something was obviously wrong. And yet, he still felt on edge. Cold, the way he always felt when hypervigilance blended with the utter certainty that the other shoe wasn't just about to drop but was headed straight for his head. 

The cream colored polka dots that covered the sheet slid away as he started to silently shift into a defensive crouch beside the bed. Then he froze, one hand still partially buried beneath Vanya’s pillow. He almost didn't dare to breathe. For long seconds, he was frozen in place in a way that would have gotten him killed in far too many ways even just a short time ago as wheels turned in his head with a very noticeable and disquieting finality. 

He looked down at the sheets. Polka dots that he very distinctly remembered last seeing in the laundry basket stubbornly remained on the bed, where they should not have been. He remembered looking at how Vanya’s fresh pillowcase had framed her face with a halo of blue on white constellations. Unless Vanya had somehow managed to change the sheets around and under him without waking him, that only left one reasonable answer. 

He hadn't consciously traveled through time, hadn't wanted to, and the possibility that he'd somehow unintentionally done so made his mouth dry out with terror. “Vanya?” He rasped. He hadn't moved, couldn't. The idea of being betrayed by the one of the few things he'd taken for granted in his long life, his iron control over his own powers, left him shaken and floundering. Especially because of the disquieting array of possibilities that lay waiting for him to acknowledge them. He could feel them curling tight threads of possibility around his throat until he almost couldn't breathe. If that part of his powers had slipped beyond his control, maybe the ‘space’ part of his time-space manipulation had, too. He'd devoted no small amount of time and energy to calculating the fluctuations of diverging timelines, maybe this was…

He had to press his hand tight against his mouth to hold back a noise. There was an unreasoning, gibbering terror at what might be waiting for him outside of that door. Maybe Vanya was dead, or had never been born at all, or was so different as to be unrecognizable. 

She still hadn't answered, and Five said her name again, louder. Stumbled away from the bed to bump into her end table. Something clattered unseen onto the floor, but all that mattered was that the next moment Vanya was there. She was talking to him, hands coming up to frame his face. He looked up in a daze at the very real, very familiar Vanya, relief and fear making his tongue feel thick and clumsy in his mouth. “Five?” Her face was twisted in concern. “What's wrong?” 

He swallowed at the same time as she trailed off into silence. “I don't know what happened,” he said unsteadily. “Something's-” He shook his head, struggling to put words to the yawning fear that felt like sand pulling away from beneath his feet just before the crash of an unseen wave. He knew it was coming, but it hadn't and it hadn't and all the while it was just roaring higher overhead. 

"Did you time travel?” She asked him carefully. The tone she used was strange, and at any other time he'd have paid it the attention it deserved. Right now, though, he shook his head in a sharp twist to the side that cut Vanya off partway through opening her mouth. 

"I couldn't have, but this isn't-” He cut himself off again, frustrated and unable to tell her that he had to have, because admitting that to her was almost as frightening as the idea itself.

"What do you remember last?”

"It doesn't matter,” he said roughly, then, “What do _ you _remember last?” He asked it almost without thinking at first, but then he honed in on that thought with the relieved determination of someone at last seeing a life buoy thrown beside them in the water. 

Vanya hesitated, which made his eyes narrow. “You've been forgetting things,” she said at last. “Little things at first, then, um. Bigger ones.” She wasn't quite looking at him when she said that, and he knew there were whole conversations contained in that gesture. “I didn't know how to bring it up. I thought you were just tired, or… you said you were almost sixty,” she added more hesitantly, “maybe…”

“I'm not going senile, Vanya.” It came out sharper than he'd meant it to, and he saw her stiffen. He could have apologized, _ should _ have apologized, but instead he turned away to hurry to the small writing desk that a number of his papers had ended up on. He rifled through them with careless haste, almost ripping some of the pages as he went. He only looked at the dates. They were out of order, as his things usually became after a while, but he quickly found that there were missing pages. He couldn't find half a dozen he had finished writing shortly before Vanya had managed to cajole him into going to bed last night. They didn't appear the next time he looked through them, or the two times after that. “Where are they?” 

He could feel Vanya standing close behind him, but she didn't say anything. That only tightened the fist that was closing chill fingers in a vise around his heart. When he spoke his voice cracked, coming out harsher that it should have been. _ “Where are they, Vanya?” _

“Where’s what?” She finally asked. 

"My work! I just did it last night, it should be here! You hid them, or threw them away, you had to. Where did you put them!” He whirled around. Her face was pale and drawn, and he had no way of knowing whether the chin she thrust out at him was a show or not. 

"I didn't put them anywhere, because you didn't write anything last night, Five. We went out. When we came back, you didn't write at all. Look,” she sighed, “just… just come with me and-”

“Don't!” When Vanya started to lift a hand to reach for him, he could feel his face twist into a snarl. She stopped, her hand hovering halfway between them. He couldn't bear to look at it, or at her, which of course meant he didn't look anywhere else. “Don’t patronize me.” Before he got even one syllable out, he already knew it was a mistake, but he couldn't stop himself. His words were turning into birds and flying away from him. Now that he'd made the mistake of letting one loose they were tumbling out of his mouth in a torrent. “I don't need it, and I don't need you trying to wrap me in cotton when I just want you to stop! For once in your life, Vanya, stop!” 

Five dragged his hand up and pressed it into his eyes until purple stars burst and died inside his eyelids. Then he let it fall, and looked at Vanya. Instead of fear or anger in her eyes he saw the same weary acceptance that he had last seen on the other end of an endless table. Except that back then, that expression had been aimed at Reginald Hargreeves. 

Five closed his mouth. Closed his mouth and tucked his tongue behind his teeth with a sharp sound that made his stomach twist. 

Shame was cold the way fear was cold. Not numbing, but yawning wide beneath him, a deep black lake filled with monsters of his own creation. The only thing between him and the greedy, clutching weight on the other side was a thin layer of ice. Every ragged breath he sucked in through his nose made it crack. Made a sliver break loose and lodge itself into his skin. A dozen pinprick pains, small on their own. Insignificant. But together, they added up to a wrenching pain that made him clap a hand over his mouth. “I-” 

Five did not stammer. Five did not stumble over his words or become lost or substitute in filler words to give himself time to think. Five was precise, and Five was sure and Five had the utmost confidence in communicating what he wanted to say. But this time, he did. He had. Was. “I-” His internal scripts hadn't accounted for barking at Vanya. What _ could _be said that would measure up to this?

Vanya was looking at him without saying a word. That restless fear almost made him blurt something out until he bit the inside of his cheek. Finally, something shifted between them and she nodded. “Okay,” she said. 

Five stiffened. “...okay? What- what are you trying to-”

“I'm not trying to do anything,” was her answer. “You're scared. Talking about it right now is just going to make it worse. So we won't.”

His palms ached. He was distantly aware of the edges of his badly chewed nails digging half-moons into his palm. “You can't just forgive like that, Vanya,” he managed after several attempts at getting the words out only ended up lodging them in his throat. 

"I didn't say I was. I'm just choosing to talk about that later.”

"You can't-”

Vanya took hold of one of his hands and pressed it against her cheek. Five was motionless, save for the fine shivers running through his every muscle. He was arrested by her eyes, unable to look away even when the bottom of his stomach dropped to the level of his knees and kept going because… He was locked in a tidal orbit around her, drawn in ever tighter and tighter circles that he knew would mean disaster for at least one if not both of them, but. 

But. 

There was Vanya, and Vanya’s eyes and Vanya’s smile warm under his hand, and it was impossible to do anything but willingly close his eyes and lean into her gravity. “It's okay,” she murmured. He felt her lips move against the top of his head, her breath ghosting warm and making him squeeze his eyes shut tight against the urge to let loose the wild, unrestrained noise building in his chest. It ached, holding it back, scraping his throat raw as if he'd been yelling this whole time when he hadn't spoken a word. “It's okay to rest. Let me help you this time, the way you've always helped me.”

The noise built and built, cresting like a wave. But when he spoke, his voice came out small and thin and afraid. Weak. “I don't know how. Vanya,” he said a little faster, a little more desperate, “I don't know how, I don't-”

His free hand had clenched on her shoulder tightly enough that it must have hurt her, but Vanya only turned her head to press a kiss to his temple. “It's as easy as falling asleep. As hard, too,” she added with a laugh that was more exhale than sound. “All you have to do is let go.”

"Let go?” He was inhaling faster where she was breathing out slow and steady, almost hyperventilating through his nose between words. He curled into her, tucked himself close to the shape of her until he felt more than heard her answer. 

"It's just like falling. The trick is you have to trust me to catch you. Can you do that?”

He didn't know. Could he, when he didn't know what waited beneath her hands if she wasn't strong enough to hold onto the weight of him? “Yes,” he said anyway, because he didn't know how to say anything else. 

And just like him, Vanya answered the only way she could. “Even if you don't, I don't mind. We have the rest of our lives for me to earn that trust, right?”


End file.
